By ROBERT PRICE

Californian staff writer

To hear some people tell it, country music is at a crossroads. One path leads to the Next Big Thing, and the other runs off a cliff.

Those people are wrong, of course. Country music is an entertainment Godzilla, a self-perpetuating creature that, over the past 50 years, has meandered from the back woods to Main Street, and doesn’t seem inclined to return. Country music has become pop music, its stars as recognizable in Los Angeles and New York as in Meridian, Miss., or Sherman, Texas.

But as Nashville morphs its chief export into a more universally palatable product, it runs the risk of alienating a share of its customers. Some purists bemoan the abundance of “hat acts,” those interchangeable, pearl-toothed baritones in boots and tight Wranglers. Some complain about predictable, derivative melodies and the shallow story lines of accompanying lyrics.

“A lot of what you hear today is just ditty music,” said Nashville songwriter Tommy Collins, a former Bakersfield contemporary of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens. “Some of these songs you won’t hear 10 years from now. They don’t have longevity.”

Meanwhile, innovators and traditionalists alike - including practitioners of a neo-Bakersfield Sound brewed from a wild concoction of punk, Elvis and electric Okie - find themselves left off country-music playlists. Meanwhile, successful country artists back themselves with pseudo-rock bands and balladeers resort to simplistic pop sounds. Some wonder about the future of that thing we all once knew as country.

and a former Bakersfield performer. “I don’t hear a lot of songs that can compete with Hank Williams’ ‘I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love With You.’ A lot of it today borders on the pop sound.”

Owens, who runs Bakersfield’s two biggest country-music stations as well as its most prominent country nightclub, the Crystal Palace, isn’t a bit afraid of the debate. He’s been in a stare-down with Nashville, off and on, for years.

“If one more cryin’ cowboy lullaby comes out ...,” Owens said, shaking his head in exasperation. “Some people call it cookie cutter. You can call it what you want. I guess the dollars are so huge when you get to the Elvis level, when you get to the Garth Brooks level, that it’s worth all that investment for the record companies. They’re trying to find another Garth Brooks, another Elvis, another Beatles, another Rolling Stones. That ain’t the way it works.”

But the recording industry, after all, is a business. Record companies follow the money, and when a certain artist with an identifiable set of characteristics demonstrates commercial appeal, label executives have a tendency to start shopping for similar talent. Who says the cloning of humans is still years away?

“Nashville’s going to go with whatever sells,” said country singer Dale Watson of Austin, Texas. “If it was monetarily gainful, they’d do it. But they don’t really care what it sounds like. ... Right now country music is being made by people who don’t like country music, so they’ve got to rock it up or pop it down.

“I would rather see the drought come along, the darkness before the storm, than prosper with that music they’re producing now. If you make the food scarce for the rats, they’ll run out of town.

The big corporations, that’s the worst thing that ever happened to country music. That and line dancing.”

Owens bemoans the increasing number of record labels on the country-music landscape - a trend that has doubtlessly contributed to the number of look-alike, sound-alike acts.

“Five years ago there were 200 people recording there (in Nashville) and they had 26 recording labels,” he said. “Now there’s 300 people making records in Nashville and they have 35 labels. All these record labels that were never into country, all of a sudden they get a country department.”

But there may be an upside to the explosion of record labels. Left-of-center, ultra-traditional and folk-blues-country hybrid acts that might never have seen the inside of a recording studio are signing deals with small, independent companies.

And now, in the last five years, those fringe acts are finding a home on radio. A new format called Americana, tied to a musical trend known as the No Depression movement, is making inroads in a few markets around the country. It is a format that Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt and Van Morrison might have chosen (or been forced to choose) if they had broken in during the mid-1990s.

“It’s a branch of country with lesser-known country artists who don’t fit that ‘country’ label,” said Chris Marino of WMLB-AM, a 5,000-watt station near Atlanta that switched from an unprofitable “hot country” format to “highly profitable” Americana three years ago. The Gavin Report, a San Francisco-based music-industry trade publication, selected WMLB as its Americana-format station of the year, and made Marino its Americana program director of the year.

“We play a lot of singer-songwriters, rockabilly and older country that’s been cast aside,” he said. “You’ll hear Waylon Jennings, Buck Owens, Lefty Frizzell, Carl Perkins and Hank Williams right next to the Bad Livers, Wilco, the Backsliders and the Derailers. It’s a wide range. That’s the appeal of it: It’s for country music fans, young and old, who are sick of country. And you’d be surprised how well it works.”

In the 1960s, Marino observed, AM radio played a divergent array of artists and genres, back to back to back: The Animals followed by Sly and the Family Stone followed by Sonny & Cher. Somehow it made sense. Americana is not afraid to use that strategy. But other modern formats, whether they be country, rock or R&B/dance, are loath to mix musical categories.

“I’ll come out of George Jones song and go right into (converted punk-rockers) Son Volt,” Marino said. “That approach has enabled us to attract a lot of the disenfranchised country music listeners out there.

“A lot of the stuff coming out of Nashville has devolved. It hit a high point in 1989 with Randy Travis and Dwight Yoakam, and then all of a sudden it sounds nothing like country music. It’s basically bubble gum music. It’s lunacy - no story telling, and if there’s a story at all, it’s a cute, inane story.”

Those voices comprising this chorus of criticism, of course, are careful to note that their complaints are meant for a select group in the country-music establishment, not for the artists who are merely trying to play by Nashville’s rules, or for the few enlightened big-label executives who see a glimmer of the big picture.

Many critics are encouraged by big-label signings such as the Mavericks, who combine a respect for tradition with progressive musical adaptation. And they’re encouraged by the continuing commercial success of artists like George Strait and Alan Jackson, who represent a more traditional approach to country music.

But the outcry is unmistakable: Country purists and country insurgents alike are frustrated enough with mainstream country formatting to form an unlikely alliance with practitioners of the folk and blues genres.
Maybe we should have expected this.

“What’s happened is greed, greed, greed,” Owens said. “Now the golden goose is getting close havin’ that death rattle in its chest.”